BIUST Student Presentations

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BIUST Student Presentations

The two students from Botswana International University of Science and Technology (BIUST) studying BSc in  Biological Sciences and Biotechnology, Leeme Marumoagae and Goabaone Mokoto has been attached in NFTRC at the department of Food  Microbiology and Biotechnology for the past few weeks.

As it is a norm for Student Interns to give presentations on the research they carried out while attached at NFTRC, Leeme and Goabaone did the same on the 23rd October 2018.

Goabaone, presented on Detection of Pork Meat in Poultry Products using Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR). He said the reason why he undertook this research was to confirm whether meat adulteration was a reality locally.

Leeme and Goabaone

He conducted his research using chicken polony, chicken vienna sausages and turkey, with raw chicken meat as the control. He said there are suppliers who tend to do meat adulteration to add weight to the food product, and addition of substances such as colourants improves the appearance of the product, which may fetch a higher price, whereas there are some disadvantages in that food adulteration may cause food allergies, or even death if it is severe.

He concluded that in all his three samples only chicken polony tested positive for pork, which indicated that there was meat adulteration during processing.

Leeme presented on Detection of Meat Adulteration in Bovine Meat Products. He said such meat tended to be adulterated with donkey, deer or water buffalo meat. He further said what prompted his research is that meat tends to have a different taste from how it is expected to be, and may at times even cause allergic reactions. He conducted the research using beef steak, russian polony, beef sausage and french polony.

His results showed that none of the samples contained donkey meat, which meant that they were not adulterated with it. NFTRC staff also had the opportunity to comment on the presentations and Dr M. Mosele highlighted that although no donkey meat adulteration had been found, there was still possibility of adulteration with pork as it is normal practice in processing of beef polonies to add pork fat, so if one was not looking for pig DNA they may wrongly assume the products to be unadulterated. The duo was commended for their hard work. They completed by thanking NFTRC staff for their support throughout the attachment period.

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